An international legal agreement governing the global antimicrobial commons would represent the strongest commitment mechanism for achieving collective action on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Since AMR has important similarities to climate change—both are common pool resource challenges that require massive, long-term political commitments—the first article in this special issue draws lessons from various climate agreements that could be applicable for developing a grand bargain on AMR. We consider the similarities and differences between the Paris Climate Agreement and current governance structures for (...) AMR, and identify the merits and challenges associated with different international forums for developing a long-term international agreement on AMR. To be effective, fair, and feasible, an enduring legal agreement on AMR will require a combination of universal, differentiated, and individualized requirements, nationally determined contributions that are regularly reviewed and ratcheted up in level of ambition, a regular independent scientific stocktake to support evidence informed policymaking, and a concrete global goal to rally support. (shrink)

This paper argues that, in addition to humanitarian concerns, policies toward immigrants should also be shaped by recognition of special responsibilities toward some populations of noncitizens. National governments acquire such responsibilities in part through their histories of coercive impositions on those populations. Former imperial powers, in particular, often possess special obligations toward the inhabitants of their foreign colonies that go beyond their general humanitarian responsibilities. Those obligations might be met in various ways; but if national governments of wealthy, formerly imperial (...) states granted greater access for immigration to the poor of their former colonies, migration flows might significantly contribute to reductions in global levels of inequality. (shrink)

The work of literary structuralists, particularly Roland Barthes, provides sharper insights into ethnomethodology than symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, or phenomenology. Further, it suggests that the metaphor of text may be fruitful for analysts of everyday life. Greater theoretical benefits derive from that metaphor, however, if one applies it using the ideas of literary theorists outside the structuralist tradition.

Like the word of resurrection uttered at the mouth of Jesus' tomb, preaching is the proclamation of a word from beyond ourselves, a word of God's invincible grace and steadfast love.

Traditionally, physicians and parents made decisions about children’s health care based on western practices. More recently, with legal and ethical development of informed consent and recognition for decision making, children are becoming active participants in their care. The extent to which this is happening is however blurred by lack of clarity about what children — of diverse levels of cognitive development — are capable of understanding. Moreover, when there are multiple surrogate decision makers, parental and professional conflict can arise concerning (...) children’s ‘best interest’. Giving children a voice and offering choice promotes their dignity and quality of life. Nevertheless, it also presents with many challenges. Case studies using pseudonyms and changed situational identities are used in this article to illuminate the complexity of ethical challenges facing nurses in end-of-life care with children and families. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a (...) discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. (shrink)

With Google marking its 20th year online, the piece provides a retrospective of cultural commentary and select works of Google art that have transformed the search engine into an object of critical interest. Taken up are artistic and cultural responses to Google by independent artists but also by cultural critics and technology writers, including the development of such evocative notions as the deep web, flickering man and filter bubble. Among the critiques that have taken shape in the works to be (...) discussed here are objects and subjects brought into being by Google, Googlization, Google’s information politics, its licensing as well as issues surrounding specific products such as Google Street View, as Google leaves the web, capturing more spaces to search. (shrink)

Eminent psychologists were asked to reflect on their work and discuss the basic tenets of beliefs of their psychologies and how they arrived at them. The result is this fascinating collection. Contributors discuss subject matter for psychology, what findings they are most certain of, the best methods to study research problems, and what direction the field will take in the future.

Populist protests against Coronavirus-related restrictions in the US appear paradoxical in three respects. Populism is generally hostile to expertise, yet it has flourished at a moment when expertise has seemed more indispensable than ever. Populism thrives on crisis and indeed often depends on fabricating a sense of crisis, yet it has accused mainstream politicians and media of overblowing and even inventing the Corona crisis. Populism, finally, is ordinarily protectionist, yet it has turned anti-protectionist during the pandemic and challenged the allegedly (...) overprotective restrictions of the nanny-state. I address each apparent paradox in turn before speculating in conclusion about how populist distrust of expertise, antipathy to government regulation, and skepticism toward elite overprotectiveness may come together – in the context of intersecting medical, economic, political, and epistemic crises – in a potent and potentially dangerous mix. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an urgent threat to global public health and development. Mitigating this threat requires substantial short-term action on key AMR priorities. While international legal agreements are the strongest mechanism for ensuring collaboration among countries, negotiating new international agreements can be a slow process. In the second article in this special issue, we consider whether harnessing existing international legal agreements offers an opportunity to increase collective action on AMR goals in the short-term. We highlight ten AMR priorities and (...) several strategies for achieving these goals using existing “legal hooks” that draw on elements of international environmental, trade and health laws governing related matters that could be used as they exist or revised to include AMR. We also consider the institutional mandates of international authorities to highlight areas where additional steps could be taken on AMR without constitutional changes. Overall, we identify 37 possible mechanisms to strengthen AMR governance using the International Health Regulations, the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, the International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, and the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm conventions. Although we identify many shorter-term opportunities for addressing AMR using existing legal hooks, none of these options are capable of comprehensively addressing all global governance challenges related to AMR, such that they should be pursued simultaneously with longer-term approaches including a dedicated international legal agreement on AMR. (shrink)

This article examines the implicit promises of fairness in evidence based medicine , namely to avoid discrimination through objective processes, and to distribute effective treatments fairly. The relationship between EBM and vulnerable groups is examined. Several aspects of EBM are explored: the way evidence is created , and the way evidence is applied in clinical care and health policy. This analysis suggests that EBM turns our attention away from social and cultural factors that influence health and focuses on a narrow (...) biomedical and individualistic model of health. Those with the greatest burden of ill health are left disenfranchised, as there is little research that is relevant to them, there is poor access to treatments, and attention is diverted away from activities that might have a much greater impact on their health. (shrink)

Americans have always been divided over whether to welcome or to discourage immigration. But virtually all American leaders have rested their views on notions that the United States has unique providential or world-historical significance-as an asylum for the world's oppressed, as a model to the world, or even as the world's leader. Today, it is normatively desirable for the U.S. to view itself not as the world's "city on a hill" but simply as one worthy political society among many others. (...) Whether such a view can be made politically appealing to most Americans, however, remains in doubt. (shrink)

Distributed Cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organisational perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a diversity of technological artefacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part.

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is an important aspect of the classical theism of philosophers like Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. Recently the doctrine has been defended in a Thomist mode using the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. I argue that this approach entails problems which can be avoided by taking Anselm’s more Neoplatonic line. This does involve accepting some controversial claims: for example, that time is isotemporal and that God inevitably does the best. The most difficult problem involves trying to reconcile (...) created libertarian free will with the Anselmian DDS. But for those attracted to DDS the Anselmian approach is worth considering. (shrink)

Why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally harmful to our wellbeing? That is the question which lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love. The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us hopefully attached to a romantic partnership that we have (...) already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political. Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou on love in the age of late capitalism, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon, in Ahmed’s words, ‘happiness for life’, to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific notion of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism. (shrink)

What does ‘care’ mean in contemporary society? How are caring relationships practised in different contexts? What resources do individuals and collectives draw upon in order to care for, care with and care about themselves and others? How do such relationships and practices relate to broader social processes? Care shapes people’s everyday lives and relationships and caring relations and practices influence the economies of different societies. This interdisciplinary book takes a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to exploring caring relationships, identities and practices (...) within and across a variety of cultural, familial, geographical and institutional arenas. Grounded in rich empirical research and discussing key theoretical, policy and practice debates, it provides important, yet often neglected, international and cross-cultural perspectives. It is divided into four sections covering: caring within educational institutions; caring amongst communities and networks; caring and families; and caring across the life-course. Contributing to broader theoretical, philosophical and moral debates associated with the ethics of care, citizenship, justice, relationality and entanglements of power, _Critical Approaches to Care_ is an important work for students and academics studying caring and care work in the fields of health and social care, sociology, social policy, anthropology, education, human geography and politics. (shrink)